Manual sections
The Assumption Tax
Clarity now, or interest later.
Every question left open at the start becomes an assumption. Assumptions come due later, with interest.
Clarity now, or interest later.
- Where ambiguity gets in
- The price when any of the above fails
- In the tunnel
- Digging without a survey
- Enforced by
- The bill
The cost
The Assumption Tax is not a principle you apply. It is the bill you receive when one is skipped.
At the start of a piece of work, an open question is cheap: a conversation, a decision, a line in the scope. Leave it open and someone answers it anyway, silently, by building. Three, six, nine or twelve months later the answer turns out to be wrong, and the tax is due: rework, a missed expectation, a release bottleneck, an outage at 2 AM.
The choice is not between paying and not paying. It is between signing the Clarity Contract now, or paying the Assumption Tax later.
How it is levied
Each principle in the core closes one place the tax gets in:
- The Clarity Contract skipped: Assumptions about scope. Rework when the result is not what was meant.
- Rigid Mobility skipped: Assumptions about what a phase proved. A pilot that was really a demo.
- The Tunnel skipped: Assumptions that a request was small. Focus spent on side doors.
- Audit Exhaust skipped: Assumptions about why a decision was made. Nobody can reconstruct it.
- The Same Room skipped: Assumptions that every door does the same thing. Integrations that disagree.
The test
For each open question: who decided the answer, and where is it written down?
Estimate it
The Assumption Tax calculator gives an estimate from your own inputs. It is an estimate, not a measurement: the measurement is what your records show once the work runs through GovernanceOS.